Netflix is betting its reputation on a slate of new shows which include a blind superhero, a family with dark secrets and a fish-out-of-water comedy.
The streaming service has unveiled an ambitious lineup of original programming for this year which it hopes will build on the success of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.
From March subscribers will start finding an expanded roster of dramas, sitcoms, children’s shows, documentaries and films, totalling 320 hours of original programming, underscoring Netflix’s drive to create rather than just disseminate content.
The company also announced at a gathering of the Television Critics Association (TCA) in Los Angeles on Wednesday that it was renewing Marco Polo for another 10-episode run and expressed optimism Arrested Development and Lilyhammer would also return.
Its chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, gave premiere dates for some of the flagship new shows.
Daredevil, Marvel’s first series for Netflix, will premiere on 10 April with 13 one-hour episodes, starring Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, a blind superhero who fights injustice by day as a lawyer and by night as a vigilante.
Marvel will produce another three Netflix original series – AKA Jessica Jones, also due this year, plus Iron Fist and Luke Cage – culminating in a miniseries, The Defenders, which will unite the characters.
The Los Gatos-based streaming service will also gamble on the sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, featuring Ellie Kemper as a naive young woman who is rescued from a doomsday cult and starts life anew in New York.
It was created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, the team behind 30 Rock, for NBC but the network then balked, reportedly fearing low ratings in a drama-heavy mid-season schedule.
Netflix snapped up the first season, which will debut on 6 March, and commissioned a second season. Fey joked that, freed from network constraints, the next season will include racier material – “mostly shower sex”.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, like Orange Is the New Black, features a young woman plunged into an alien environment but appears to be a lighter, more conventional comedy. It was an updated take on the Mary Tyler Moore theme of a girl in the big city, said Carlock, and was written specifically for Kemper, who starred in The Office. “We like her face on camera. We reverse-engineered from her.”
On 8 May, Netflix will debut another comedy, Grace and Frankie, helmed by Friends creator Marta Kauffman. It stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as “frenemies” whose lives are turned upside down when their husbands fall in love with each other.
The company has invested heavily in Bloodline, a 13-episode family drama-cum-thriller which debuts on 20 March. A heavy-hitting ensemble cast includes Kyle Chandler, Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek and Ben Mendelsohn.
Set in the Florida Keys, the story explores the tangled secrets of the Rayburn family after the black sheep eldest son, played by Mendelsohn, returns home.
It was created by brothers Todd and Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman, who also created the political drama Damages.
“We thought it would be interesting if we could take the family drama and escalate it into a psychological thriller,” said Glenn, in an interview with the trio. “Our story is about a family that turns on itself.”
Viewers have the appetite for morally ambiguous, intricately plotted dramas, said Zelman. “There was a time when television was purely escapist. It would clean things up so that by the time you went to sleep at 10 everything was good in the world. Clearly people have an appetite now for something that’s a lot more cynical; to explore darkness and challenge those values.”
The absence of commercial breaks and the audience’s ability to binge on episodes let writers construct the series as a 13-hour film following Hollywood’s classic three-act structure, said Todd Kessler. “On network television it seems there are requirements about character likeability – removing certain areas of gray so you understand how you are supposed to process them. An audience is encouraged to decide early on what they feel and stick with that.”
A streaming model, in contrast, afforded greater storytelling density because audiences were more engaged and less likely to be making tea and ironing while watching, said Glenn Kessler. “It’s different now. It’s like you carve out time to not multitask and to soak in the experience that is going on in front of you. You are rewarded for total engagement to that hour.” Otherwise, he warned, “you might get very strong tea and a burnt shirt.”
Mendelsohn, the Australian actor who plays the son in Bloodline, said Netflix was riding a golden age of long-format storytelling which was luring big-screen actors. He echoed Kevin Spacey, an Oscar winner who stars in House of Cards: “A few years ago my agent would not even have considered letting me do something like this. But the game has changed. Now people are banging down the doors to do it.”
Unlike the Rayburn family’s secrets, there is little chance of viewers discovering the ratings for Bloodline or Netflix’s other shows. In his address to the TCA, Sarandos reaffirmed Netflix’s policy of not revealing viewership figures on the grounds it did not sell advertising nor weight for prime-time viewing. “There’s no real business reason for us to internally or externally report those numbers.”
